Don’t Forget To Give Head Pats to Your Designers

Hi, I am Medic, and, despite the username, I am a graphic designer. That means I design graphics as part of my job. Now, graphic design isn’t the only thing I do. I am supposedly a multi-talented individual. Capable of doing lots of other things, like web design and writing as well. But graphic design is the skill I picked up the earliest. I had a copy of Corel Draw on my crappy computer when I was 11 and it all went downhill from there.

Design is harder than it looks.

At first glance, design seems to fall into two categories. Super sleek, super clean, super perfected things. And everything else. When you think about design, the first things that come to mind are the fancy, expensive things. Someone will tell you that a well-designed product is probably something from Apple, or a new phone, or something like that. But people tend to forget that it’s all been designed, all the way down to the icons on your home screen.

Someone had to draw that icon at some point. Someone also spent a large amount of time designing default backgrounds, creating fonts to work in the phone and so on. It’s also worth considering that design work was also put into not just all the marketing, but all material related to said phone.

Everything is designed.

My point is, everything is designed. Including every graphic you see. Time and effort was put into everything, from the images on billboards to the icons of apps on your phone. But design doesn’t have to be expensive. Sure, you can spend a huge amount of money on getting the perfect design done. But you can also spend just a little bit of money to make sure that, well, it’s not crap.

And in this day and age, with so much competition, the price of design has really, really gone down. Thanks to more easily accessed technologies, open source programs and everyone capable of having a computer that can handle a basic design program, getting design work done is easy. Plus, due to the new gig economy where everyone’s work is basically part time, on a job-by-job basis and considered worthless, design work is cheaper than ever!

A random aside though, fuck Adobe CC

I will be honest here, Idon’t use the most modern tools when it comes to my graphic design. So I use the next best thing. Because, frankly, I’m not paid enough and I don’t trust Adobe enough.

For years, I’ve been using a copy of Adobe CS6, which I’m pretty sure I had a student version of. Adobe CS6 does what I need, without me having to pay a monthly subscription for it, and without being permanently online and connected to Adobe’s servers. Which I don’t trust. Adobe have had multiple data leaks, one of which was literally in October last year.

Anyway, back to being a designer.

The sad thing is, people will generally skip the whole designing thing. They think it saves them money in the long run. After all, money saved is better than having a shred of dignity and some nice graphic design. Or even basic graphics.

And, because most graphic designers have some combination of brains, eyes and ears and other senses, they will happily listen to your requests and make you something nice. There’s always wriggle room for some change. And, like I said earlier, design work is cheaper than ever.

Basically, there’s no excuse these days. Your branding, your advertising, your logo, everything, they should all be somewhat well-designed. Or at least not shit-looking. Even if you can’t afford a designer for every other part of a project, from web design to product design to testing and quality assurance, at least you can slap some good graphic design on your project.

Why am I talking about this?

Because it’s much easier to start with something nice than it is to polish a turd. And frankly, I’ve spent all day polishing turds and I’m tired and don’t know what else to write about.

Oh well.